Very few people have actually touched an iPad, much less tested the already thousands of apps dedicated to the new tablet. But, based on screen shots and some limited demos, early reviews of the major media apps are starting to come in. And "magical" they are not.

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm leads off the charge, saying some of the demos, including Wired, looked promising but overall "I have to say that the initial prototypes I'm seeing are, well ... underwhelming." Ingram worries media organizations may be repeating old mistakes. "Part of the problem with mainstream media Web sites has always been that they replicate the same user interface metaphors that appear in the printed versions of their products."

Joe Zeff takes a more design-centric look at the first news apps out of the gate, complimenting the BBC and criticizing USA Today and the Associated Press. "Somewhere along the line, the designer of the AP app (APp?) got carried away with the virtual thumbtacks and paper stacks and turned what could have been a go-to site into a mess. People trust the Associated Press for a quick read on the latest news, but the iPad app fails to deliver that immediacy. Instead, the pages look like the walls at Applebee's."

And finally, Cory Doctorow writes at Boing Boing that you shouldn't bother buying an iPad at all. For media companies he has this indictment, "I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who'll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of 'content' isn't just that they can get it for free, though: it's that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too."